Post by Admin on Dec 10, 2019 9:42:50 GMT
The FBI has opened a terrorism investigation into Friday's deadly shooting at Pensacola's Naval Air Station that killed four people, including the attacker. The incident was the second deadly shooting at a U.S. naval base in less than a week. (A sailor shot three civilians on Wednesday at Pearl Harbor; two of them died before the shooter then killed himself.)
What we know about the gunman: He was a Saudi Air Force trainee identified as 21-year-old Second Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani, the New York Times reported this weekend.
He "came to the U.S. in 2017 as part of a Pentagon-approved sale of military hardware to Saudi Arabia," the Wall Street Journal reports. "His training was due to last until August 2020."
For the record: "There are 852 Saudi military service members now studying and training in the U.S.," and they are among a wider group of "5,181 foreign students from 153 countries" on a similar training path, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Eastburn told the Journal separately on Sunday.
Said U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday: "I guess we're going to have to look into the whole procedure. We'll start that immediately."
Shortly before the attack, Alshamrani went on Twitter "to blast U.S. support of Israel and accuse America of being anti-Muslim," AP reported. U.S. "investigators [also] believe the gunman visited New York City, including Rockefeller Center, days before the shooting and are working to determine the purpose of the trip."
Saudi authorities are reportedly looking into whether he "was radicalized during a trip back to the kingdom that began late last year," according to the Journal. The Times notes "Alshamrani showed videos of mass shootings at a dinner party" held the night before he opened fire at the naval base.
Several friends of the gunman have also been detained, and "one or two were filming" the attack as it happened, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed in an interview on "Fox News Sunday."
Said Esper: . I'm not trying to pass a judgment on this at this point in time. You know today, people pull out their phones and film everything and anything that happens."
Esper has ordered a review of "our vetting procedures within DoD for all the many foreign nationals that come, with good reason, to our country to train," he said Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California.
The shooting may have also exposed a "federal loophole" in how foreigners can acquire weapons inside the U.S., Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday. That's because the shooter "used a Glock 9 mm weapon that had been purchased legally in Florida," AP reports.
The names of those killed in Friday's attack:
Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, 23, from Coffee, Ala.;
Airman Mohammed Sameh Haitham, 19, from St. Petersburg, Fla.;
and Airman Apprentice Cameron Scott Walters, 21, from Richmond Hill, Ga.
Several friends of the gunman have also been detained, and "one or two were filming" the attack as it happened, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed in an interview on "Fox News Sunday."
Said Esper: . I'm not trying to pass a judgment on this at this point in time. You know today, people pull out their phones and film everything and anything that happens."
Esper has ordered a review of "our vetting procedures within DoD for all the many foreign nationals that come, with good reason, to our country to train," he said Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California.
The shooting may have also exposed a "federal loophole" in how foreigners can acquire weapons inside the U.S., Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday. That's because the shooter "used a Glock 9 mm weapon that had been purchased legally in Florida," AP reports.
The names of those killed in Friday's attack:
Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, 23, from Coffee, Ala.;
Airman Mohammed Sameh Haitham, 19, from St. Petersburg, Fla.;
and Airman Apprentice Cameron Scott Walters, 21, from Richmond Hill, Ga.
